1. Field of he Invention
This invention relates in general to systems, methods and computer readable mediums involving searching, and more specifically to conducting searches based on speculative queries.
2. Description of the Related Art
Relevance feedback in the form of query expansion (and reweighting terms selected for query expansion) is a well-known method for obtaining results that vastly improve upon an initial query. Traditional query expansion works by first identifying a set of relevant documents, selecting salient terms from these documents, adding these terms back into the initial query with an appropriate, information-theoretic weight, and then running this new query to produce a ranked list with (hopefully) higher precision than the original list.
A problem with traditional query expansion is that even when terms are weighted using effective information-theoretic measures, there remains a question of how many terms to actually add to the query, as this can have a large effect on the quality of the final outcome.